


You Are Here

by basset_voyager



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic, Multi, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, mix of angst and fluff, steve rogers is poly and cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:39:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3287234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I was just wondering why none of us are sleeping together,” Steve concludes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fartherfaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/gifts).



Brooklyn in February hasn’t changed at all. Sure, the buildings look different, the cars are sleeker, and the people in the subway station look at cell phones instead of reading the paper. In a lot of ways, the Brooklyn of today feels like a different city than the one where Steve grew up, and yet, in the ways that really matter, everything is the same. People still run to catch the R train to Manhattan bundled up in hats and scarves. They still talk sports while they try to hail a cab and complain about the weather over cheap coffee. The Brooklyn Public Library central building is still there, as is the bridge, solid and familiar on the skyline. It’s still a city of work, of constant bustle, of stubborn hometown pride.

But Steve doesn’t live in Brooklyn anymore. Instead, when he came back to New York he moved into the Stark Tower uptown - well, it’s the Avengers Tower now, according to Pepper’s latest press release. He’s still not used to having so much space; the open floors and picture windows of his apartment only serve to remind him of what’s not there. Plus, he still thinks that the building is ugly and ostentatious, even though he told Tony otherwise over a beer on his first night here. Not in a million years would he have thought he would miss the cramped, noisy apartment he and Bucky shared before the war, but he does. Well. What he really misses is Bucky himself, he supposes. That apartment always smelled of cabbage and had cockroaches the size of Steve’s thumb, but at least there they had each other.

“He’ll come home when he’s ready,” Natasha says, shaking her hair away from her face.

“Stop moving,” Steve tells her. “I’m trying to get your eyes right.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was disrupting your genius,” Natasha replies, but she’s smiling.

Steve adjusts his sketchbook on his knee and puts the finishing touches on her eyelashes, glancing up at her periodically to make sure he’s got things exact. She’s smiling his favorite smile of hers, where her mouth only curves up ever so slightly on one side, as if she’s sharing a secret with him and nobody else. When Natasha smiles broadly, toothily, it means she’s smiling to stay alive. When she smiles just to smile, it’s small. Almost gentle.

“Are you done?” she asks. Steve mock groans.

“Okay, okay, we can take a break,” he laughs. She pulls her hair over to one side of her neck as she bends over his shoulder to take a look at the sketch, and red strands tickle the side of his face.

“I look young,” she says.

“We _are_ young,” Steve replies. She chuckles and pulls the sketchbook out of his hands to make room for herself on his lap. Her arms wrap around his neck as she buries her face in his shoulder, and he responds with one hand on her shoulder and the other holding her legs behind the knee so she doesn’t slide off of him. It’s become natural for them, ever since D.C., to touch each other like this, and they haven’t really gotten to the point of talking about what it means.

There are so many questions he wants to ask her, questions that burst out of every drawing he does of her, where her face always looks shadowed and impassable. He wants to ask her how old she really is, what her family was like, whether she was in love with Bucky in Russia, what would happen if he kissed her again, for real this time, and how she deals so well with everything around her _changing_ so much over and over. He looks down at her hair, dyed a slightly different red than her natural color, because even that is armor.

He breathes when she does and doesn’t say anything. 

.

Sam and Steve have flirted since they met, an easy exchange of banter with an undercurrent of _maybe_ that Steve can’t quite figure out.

“On your damn right,” Sam pants as he jogs past Steve, who’s stopped to tie his shoe. Steve responds by winking at him as he overtakes him thirty seconds later.

“Do historians know you’re such an asshole?” Sam calls after him. Laughing, Steve turns around and starts running backwards so he can look at Sam.

“Only the good ones,” Steve replies. He runs until his breath sears through his lungs like it used to when he was a teenager after two flights of stairs.

Sam moved back up to New York after Tony offered him a job as a consultant to help them figure out what the Avengers can be without SHIELD, if they can be anything. He and Steve meet up to run in Central Park at least a few mornings a week, and they always get a coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts afterwards. The people who work at the counter have learned not to stare at him, but every once in a while there’s still someone who recognizes Steve and stops to gawk. Sometimes, they even ask him for photographs.

“Man, it’s six in the morning,” Sam mutters, but Steve always does it, exaggerating his confusion with smartphones to make the kids laugh.

“I don’t really get why people want pictures of me all sweaty,” Steve remarks one day as he pushes the door to the shop open with his shoulder. Sam raises his eyebrows at him.

“What?” Steve says.

“Come on, Steve,” Sam tells him, and he theatrically gives Steve a once over with his eyes. Steve responds by wrinkling his nose and punching Sam in the shoulder.

“Shut up.”

Sometimes, Steve worries that he flirts so much with Sam because he’s afraid of having a serious conversation with him. Sam has this way of seeing through Steve’s bullshit, probably because he has so much of the same bullshit, and that disappointed look on his face is more than Steve can deal with. Other times, he wishes that the flirting would go somewhere, that he could get up the courage to hold Sam’s hand and kiss him and take him to bed like normal people do. People who aren’t both trying to piece themselves back together after one war or another. People who aren’t dealing with dead best friends or previously-dead best friends who’ve said they need more time and disappeared. Again.

There are drawings of Sam in Steve’s sketchbook, too. In some, he has wings made of feathers and in some he has wings made of steel and in others he has no wings at all.

On certain days, Steve jogs slowly so that he and Sam can run next to each other.

“Can’t get enough of my company?” Sam laughs, and Steve almost says _Nah, man, this is pity_ , but instead he only smiles.

.

Steve likes to watch Natasha and Sam together. They move so differently - she’s fluid and difficult to track, while he’s solid and open. It didn’t take them any time at all to learn that fact and start using it to their advantage, figuring out how to anticipate each others’ movements and make them complement each other. In a fight, that’s the difference between staying alive and dying. On ordinary days, it means she lounges on his kitchen counter like she’s been coming to his apartment for years and pouts at him silently until he agrees to make her food.

“Alright, alright,” he says. “I was gonna make pasta anyway. But you have to help me teach Steve the Thriller dance.” Natasha rolls over and puts her chin in her hands.

“Oo, are we trying to break our record?”

Sam and Natasha have a game going called How Many Items On Steve’s List Can We Cross Off In A Single Night. The record is four: Thai food (good), _Ghostbusters_ (“This is exactly what I died for,” Steve said), the Reagan administration (acted out in a series of increasingly drunk sketches by Natasha and Sam), and Mario Kart (which Steve turned out to be frighteningly good at). They meant to play Super Smash Bros too but they all ended up falling asleep in a pile on Sam’s couch.

“Yes,” Sam says, “and if we don’t start soon we’re not going to make it through both tapes of _Titanic_ before 10:00.”

Natasha sits up, her mouth slightly open.

“Wait. You own _Titanic_ on VHS?”

Sam brandishes his spoon. “Of course I do! Bought it when it came out. That shit is amazing. When she throws the necklace in the ocean? I cry every time, I’m telling you.”

Natasha throws her head back and laughs, and Steve laughs too just because she’s laughing, even though he doesn’t know what either of them are talking about.

“Hey,” Natasha says, as if she’s just had a brilliant idea. “Steve, were you alive when the Titanic sank?”

Steve groans and bangs his forehead against the back of the couch he’s been leaning against.

“No, I was not alive when the Titanic sank. I hate the both of you.”

“No, you don’t,” Natasha says, and she jumps over the back of the couch to tackle him. Sam appears a second later and they end up in a pile, pushing and tickling each other until the pasta boils over and Sam has to run to shut the stove off, swearing all the way.

Not every day is like this. Easy, simple. But some days are. 

.

Brooklyn in February hasn’t changed at all. The East River still flows steadily underneath the bridge as Steve walks across towards Manhattan, and the sound of cars barreling by and indistinct conversations on the sidewalk could have come from his childhood.

But when Steve sees Sam and Natasha walking to meet him, it strikes him how much things have changed. He didn’t know these people before the war, and if he hadn’t signed up for Project Rebirth, he never would have met them. It’s difficult now, to imagine a world without Natasha’s smirk or Sam’s solid determination. He grins at them as they draw closer, both wrapped up in unstylish coats and scarves that cover half of their faces.

“We couldn’t have met up somewhere warm?” Sam complains. “Somewhere with hot cocoa?”

“I like the Brooklyn Bridge,” Steve explains. He’s starting to regret asking them to meet him here, but he figured he would be braver somewhere familiar.

“Bla bla, Steve’s a real New Yorker, bla bla,” Natasha says, and Sam snickers.  

“Look, I’ve been thinking,” Steve interrupts, pulling his hat down further around his ears. “Life’s, well, life’s not short, it’s really fucking long, actually, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t - in fact that means there’s room for more - what I’m trying to say is - ”

He has to step out of the way of a cyclist careening by and he swears under his breath.

“Steve, what is it?” Natasha asks, one eyebrow raised.

“I was just wondering why none of us are sleeping together,” Steve concludes.

Sam and Natasha stare at him.

“It’s fine if neither of you want that,” Steve rambles, “but I just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t because you thought _I_ didn’t want to because you think I'm old-fashioned or something or you thought I was waiting for Bucky - he’s my best friend in the world and I love him more than pretty much anything but it’s not like that, never was. And I like both of you so much. So much. Really. I mean, what’s the point of life being so long and so full of shit if we don’t make the good parts as good as possible?”

They’re still staring at him.

“Um, that’s it,” Steve says, and he coughs awkwardly. Suddenly, a sly smile spreads over Sam’s face.

“Did you write that one down?” he asks. “Or was it off the top of your head?”

. 

Steve’s sketchbooks are filled with the way Natasha’s hands curl into fists in her sleep, the small of Sam’s back as he stretches, the way the two of them move together in bed and out of it. Some nights, Steve’s too-big apartment is filled with laughter and sex - other nights, nightmares and 2 am cups of coffee and words that hang in the air, bitter and unsayable. Steve’s most grateful for the two of them on those nights, grateful that they’re together rather than alone. Things change. Even Brooklyn in February changes. While that means that some burdens get heavier, it also means that other burdens get lighter and easier to carry.

Steve draws Sam and Natasha, and, for the first time in years, he draws himself as well.

 _Dear Bucky_ , he writes, in a letter he has no address for. _I miss you. I hope that you’re okay. I know that it might feel like the future’s a different country just like they say the past is. But it isn’t. You can make it a home. I promise._

_Love, your friend,_

_Steve_

He keeps the letter in his pocket for when Bucky comes home. Outside, the February snow has started to melt, and as the earth spins forward into March, Steve can hear the first spring birds start to sing in the park.

**Author's Note:**

> I also made a cap fam mix [that you should check out](http://8tracks.com/noelleagain/if-we-keep-looking-backwards-it-ll-break-our-necks).


End file.
